


A Certain Great Weight of Invisible Ink

by Selden



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: At least half-way to an all-female murder family AU, F/F, Not Prime Time Treat, Ominous hand-washing, Shower Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4318179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does it mean, to have murdered a murderer?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Certain Great Weight of Invisible Ink

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Emerla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emerla/gifts).



_It is an evening in winter. Alana Bloom is watching her face in the mirror.  
_

"Always watching, Alana," says Bedelia du Maurier, walking up behind her. "Even yourself." She unclasps Alana's hair. Bobby-pins clatter onto the sink.

"I have hardly been a very successful watcher," says Alana, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. In the mirror, under the flattering lights of Bedelia's bathroom, she looks just as she did that morning. Perhaps a little colder. She might smell, perhaps, faintly of gunpowder.

_It is an evening in winter. Alana Bloom is wearing an attractive, mid-range, wrap dress._

Stretch jersey with - by design - a busy print. Unassuming, approachable, professional. A little stiff and creaky, just by the hem, with blood.

"She is sleeping now," says Bedelia.

Alana nods heavily.

Abigail had looked up at them smiling, when they came down into the basement. She'd marked her page carefully in the book she was reading. _I did hope you would come,_ she had said.  _Both of you._ Then she had seen Alana's dress, wet at the hem. Her mouth had opened up like a little dark hole. _Where is he?_ she had said. _What have you done?_

"I hope you took some blood samples," Alana says. "We need to know what he was dosing her with."

"Of course," says Bedelia.

"We shouldn't leave her alone," says Alana. "It's a strange house."

 

Like a crystal set in sandstone, like a castle or a tooth. When she had come for her first appointment, Bedelia had shown her around, through tall rooms full of soft grey light, powdery as a pre-war Guerlain perfume. There had been irises in a square glass vase, the purple of old eyelids. For colour.

"I can see why Hannibal finds it restful here," she had remarked. Their feet had made no noise on the pale carpets. Bedelia had raised an eyebrow; poured them both out wine. She had been the most beautiful person Alana had ever seen. "I am very grateful you agreed to see me," Alana had said, blushing like a schoolgirl.

Bedelia had shrugged and raised her glass. "My pleasure, Dr Bloom," she had said. "This is by way of being one of Hannibal's least taxing little tests."

"A test? For you or for me?"

"For us both, I imagine. Perhaps even, in the end, for Hannibal himself," Bedelia had said. "Cheers."

 

"She'll be under for a while yet," says Bedelia now. "It was a powerful sedative." Her hands are at Alana's waist, undoing the tie of her dress.

"Do you think we passed?" asks Alana. "I am afraid that we did."

Bedelia smiles tightly, without looking up. "I know that we survived," she says.

"Consumed but not yet eaten," says Alana. Her dress falls open.

"And in any case," says Bedelia, "testing the two of us was hardly his main concern, towards the end."

"I will have to tell Will," says Alana. In the mirror, her eyes are staring and stark, the blue of dead flesh.

_It is an evening in winter._

"You will tell him what he needs to hear," Bedelia says. "But not now. Now you are with me, and alive." She eases the dress off Alana's shoulders and lets it fall. Alana kicks it away. And although Alana's hands appear perfectly clean, Bedelia starts the tap running and washes them, thorough and gentle, warm water pushing at their skin.

For a moment, Alana cannot tell which hands belong to her and which to Bedelia. There is only a knot of flesh unfurling under the flow of water, familiar but exquisitely, painfully strange.

Dissociation. A defence mechanism. A coping technique. Not unusual.

She comes back to herself with a shudder, feeling Bedelia warm and soft against her back.

"He cemented his influence over those in his power by coercing them into committing murder," Alana says. She lets her head loll back against Bedelia's. Even in her heels, she is not taller than Alana. In the mirror, her face is nearly hidden. "He sought to replicate himself; to transform others -"

"Most notably," says Bedelia, "he killed and ate people. Something I myself have no desire to do. I trust you find this sufficiently reassuring, for the moment?" She steps backwards, away from Alana, and turns on the shower. Then she unzips her dress and bends, sighing, to ease off her heels. She looks alone, and ordinary, and very tired.

It is an evening in winter. There will be other evenings, just like this.

 

Alana finishes undressing and walks over; takes Bedelia's face in her hands. The way they kiss has not changed; Bedelia leans up into it, hungry, biting. Licking at Alana's lower lip. And if Alana is kissing a mask, she cannot bring herself to care.

When they get into the shower, they bring each other off quickly, rushing for the blankness of climax, against the too-clean drag of too-wet flesh.

Bedelia's hand still between her legs, Alana blinks away water, warm as blood and, in a moment's dazzle, black as ink. She sees Hannibal again, lying at her feet. Not unamused, but certainly surprised. She had been a sweetener; an alibi. A dig at Will. A love interest of the most perfunctory sort. He had laid her out on dark sheets like a painting set aside to dry. He had handed her off to Bedelia as a distraction or reward. Perhaps he had not expected them to talk behind his back.

She bends her head under the spray; feels Bedelia solid under her fingers. Wet skin, slippery with soap. Hair looped like handwriting across her shoulders, heavy with water, darkened with it. The water runs clear, though. As if they had always been clean.

It is unlikely they will ask too many questions; that is, after all, her job. And she has always been professional. Unassuming. Approachable. She has already remade one little corner of the world, opened up one dark basement. What other wonders can she not perform?

It is an evening in winter, and Alana moves her hands over Bedelia's body, her fingers marking out words she will not yet say. The warm water keeps falling, tracing and retracing its design.

Not far away, in central Baltimore, a house is burning. Blue emergency lights shine through billows of black smoke, rising up in towers like the ghost of a great palace. A dead body lies on the floor in an upstairs room, roasting slowly through.

In a dark room in a jagged house, Abigail Hobbs sleeps, her belly still full of Hannibal's good food. Outside, snow falls in great flakes, burying the black edges of winter under sloughs and slabs of soft thick white, as if what lies underneath had never been.

 

 


End file.
